Sublime

Still, Harrison believed in a key message: The transportation infrastructure of North America is vital to the well-being of the continent. Without freight railroads, the economy would be crippled, so why not make them the best? He was all about being the best. Why couldn’t everybody else be?

the man in a literate and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms. He acquires the illusion of the third dimension and the “private point of view” as part of his Narcissus fixation, and is quite shut off from Blake’s awareness or that of the Psalmist, that we become what we behold.

As if the list of medical issues wasn’t enough, since 2015 he’d been hospitalized approximately a dozen times, the last instance in December 2016 when his temperature spiked and left him hallucinating. He’d also had his gallbladder removed during the battle for Norfolk Southern, endured a bout of shingles in late 2016 and early 2017, and had two “s

He makes sense of our life and our commitments in a world that thinks what we are doing is naivete at best and folly at worst. He has turned our world upside down.

His character excited considerable curiosity in this observer. It was not easy to reconcile his conversion to the Romish faith, with those proofs of knowledge and capacity that were exhibited by him on different occasions. A suspicion was, sometimes, admitted, that his belief was counterfeited for some political purpose.

What appears to be one of the central, orienting questions for reading Smith in the twenty-first century is a new version of the old Adam Smith Problem: how do we reconcile Smith’s advocacy of the material benefits of the market society he envisioned with his worries about its heavy moral costs?